Q:Where can I buy your products?A: All the farmers markets we attend are on the Where to Buy Love Chillies page and any special events we attend will be on there. We don’t send fresh peppers or plants in the post, but everything else is available mail order, please contact us more inmation and pricing.

Q:Where do your ingredients come from?A: All the chillies are grown by us. All other ingredients are sourced by their localness to the area or their environmental qualities and not their cost.

Q: Are chillies good you?

A: Yes. Very Good.

They contain up to twice the vitamin C of a fresh orange, one fresh chilli has more vitamin C than the daily recommended amount and they are also a decongestant, which makes them great fighting colds. They are a good source of vitamins A & E, also beta-carotene, potassium & folic acid.

A recent study at the Oxford Brookes University has shown that eating chilli sauce or fresh chillies can increase the amount of calories you burn up to two hours by 8%. So they might help you to loose weight.

But most importantly they taste great!!!.

Q:Why are chillies hot?

A: The simple answer to this is: Birds don’t have taste buds.

All plants that produce a fruit do so to reproduce. The birds eat the chillies and then drop the seed with some fertiliser a distance away. To discourage mammals which do have taste buds the chilli evolved to produce capsaicin, which is the chemical that gives the heat. The fruit of most wild peppers point upwards and are commonly known as bird peppers.

Q:How hot can chillies be and how can this be tested?

A: Very hot. The hottest are generally Habanero Orange, Scotch bonnet, South American chinenses & African bird’s eye. They are measured using a method called the Scoville Scale.

many years the system relied on human testers, the chillies were diluted until they could not be tasted.

Now a machine is used, HPLC (High Permance Liquid Chromatograph). This system gives a reading of parts per million which is multiplied by 15 to give the Scoville unit.

Most humans can cope with 150 Scovilles without a problem.

Low-pungency chillies are about

300-700 Scovilles

Mild chillies are

700-1,000 Scovilles

Medium heat chillies

1,000-1,500 Scovilles

Hot chillies

2,000-3,000 Scovilles

Extra hot

3,000-60,000 Scovilles

Vicious

60,000-500,000 Scovilles

Hottest ever (Red Savina habanero)This was a one off this chilli, normally about 300,00 Scovilles

577,000 Scovilles

Q:What is the difference between green and red chillies?A: Green chillies mostly go red. It is a state of ripeness, green are normally not as hot as red. I personally think that if you want the taste of a chilli eat it green, red are a stronger flavour but the heat distracts your taste buds.

Q:Are Chillies a spice, vegetable or fruit?

A: In the USA they are classed as a vegetable when green and a spice when red. I think they are a fruit as they have there seeds on the inside, like an apple!